Rosebuuuud. *Snow globe shatters on the ground*.
A little bit less than one year ago I was living a mere two blocks away from the ornate, old house where I live today. A small, darkly-lit, but nicely furnished two-bedroom apartment above a fancy diner was the place that I called home, and I shared that home with a good friend, who also happened to be my other good friend's girlfriend (which was not a weird situation, as it seems to be in writing). The place had charm and character. There was a large red brick wall which divided the kitchen and the living room, and it looked as if it had been through several wars and just as many re-modelings. I was often awakened at 7:00am by the staff of the diner below, who liked to blast the same upbeat polka music at extreme volume every single morning while preparing the kitchen for a day's work.
Also, within the red brick walls of that village apartment, I experienced the harshest winter of my life (which doesn't mean a lot coming from a Texan, but most of the New York locals agree with me). The cold, precipitation, and wind chill were as bitter as they were unrelenting, and most of the regular activity in my life was slowed to a sluggish, groaning halt; gigs were few, and they were often cancelled due to weather conditions; my regular job of teaching music was snowed-out half the time, and when it wasn't, only half of my students would show up on any given day; traveling anywhere in the region was a pain in my freezing posterior, if not outright hazardous; on top of that, my roommate was very often gone for days at a time.
Many people would have had an awful, cabin-feverish time in that situation, but that was not the case for me. On the contrary: it was one of the most interesting and creative times in my memory. I managed to split my seemingly-infinite free time equally between work (music practice, composition, writing, art) and play (daydreaming, reading, talking on the phone, sleeping in, the occasional movie), and each one inspired and sustained the other. It was one of the few times of my life when I had a very regular routine which I lived by; the beauty was that abstract thinking and artistic productivity were included in the routine! Patience without indolence; structure and abstraction; focus and freedom; poetry and prose; it's the only time that I've sustained a disciplined-but-bohemian lifestyle like that for any extended period. In many ways it was a dream-come-true for an artsy introvert such as myself.
Of course, the winter came to an end, as did my lease, and that era of my life; I moved a block-and-a-half away, to the spare room at my friend's place (the aforementioned ornate, old house which I live in now). It was such a short distance to move that I could have walked all of my stuff over from one place to the other in less than a day, but the mere block-and-a-half of concrete and cracked stone sidewalks that separates me from my old apartment seems to be a much farther distance, because, to me, it represents the distance between two chapters of my life. A lot has changed since then, and it often seems as if the vague memories of a year ago are the memories of another person; another life; another set of motivations, impulses, desires, and capabilities. Nostalgia has never suited me, and I very rarely hold on to objects purely for sentimental value; there's too much real value in the here-and-now. That being said, meeting a stranger from my past, or a taste or smell from years ago, can trigger something deeper, darker, and more irresistible than any bar of chocolate: the memory of being another man.
One of these memories is of the only decent bar of chocolate sold at the village grocery store during the harshest winter: Lindt Excellence Intense Orange. Consequently, it was one of the chocolates I ate all winter. It was usually accompanied by a steaming mug of spiced black tea, and a long session of songwriting.
Item: Lindt Excellence Intense Orange Dark Chocolate
Made By: Lindt and Sprungli Inc.
Made In: Stratham, NH
Purchase price: $2.50
Review: Firstly, this is cheap chocolate. Very cheap. It's made by a massive, mindless, corporate, chocolate-making machine with a yearly revenue of more than 3 billion Swiss francs, and a work force of more than 10,000 people. The recipe has been maximized for price-effectiveness and consistency. They over-roast their beans to cover up their mediocre quality; this process leeches the character from the beans, and makes each batch perfectly consistent. They add exorbitant amounts of sugar to hide the coarse, over-processed flavor of the beans. The 'orange pieces' in the ingredients list are actually a homogenized and hardened pulp of oranges, apples, sugar, thickening agents, and the blood of a virgin. Long story short: this is one step up from a Snicker's bar in quality.
But I love a good Snicker's bar. And I love this. The flavor is a blunt and sugary mix of almond and orange; the chocolate flavor is barely noticeable, and I'm surprised that they can get away with calling this 'dark chocolate'. There's no subtlety to it at all, but there's a joyful, purely-indulgent character to it. It's candy, plain and simple, and the quality is actually very high, considering the price point. When people want candy, they're usually looking for one thing: sugar, with some other stuff added in. That's what this bar delivers, while simultaneously being half-decent chocolate.
Cream of the crap, ladies and gentlemen.
-Will
